Winnipeg's late, great musical haunt Blue Note Café came alive in the dead of night

Winnipeg Free Press

a day ago

It's been said if you remember the 1960s, you weren't really there.
Ditto the Blue Note Café, a late-night live music venue that existed in Winnipeg for almost two decades, originally on Main Street at what is presently Blue Note Park and later on Portage Avenue, near Arlington Street.
Curtis Riddell is the former owner of 'the Note,' which became as famous for its cinnamon coffee and exterior neon sign as for the A-list clientele it tended to attract. Since last fall, the 69-year-old grandfather of two has been chronicling his involvement there, via an entertaining Facebook page titled Vague Recollections of the Blue Note Café, 'vague' being the key word.
You see, even though Riddell commonly rubbed shoulders with the likes of Neil Young and Dan Aykroyd — but two of the many heavyweights who dropped by his establishment at one time or another, either to perform on the always-open stage or to soak in the atmosphere — his specific memories of the nocturnal space that also helped launch the careers of homegrown acts such as Mark Reeves, Scott Nolan and Walle Larson have become somewhat blurry over time.
'Heck, I can't even remember why we decided to call it the Blue Note in the first place,' he laughs, seated in his second-floor apartment in Altona, where he's been living since 2015.
Somebody once questioned him whether the café, which remained open till 4 a.m., seven nights a week, was so-named for Blue Note Records, an American jazz label founded in 1939. His response: he had no idea there was such a thing.
Nor was he aware there were already 'something like 55 Blue Notes' in various corners of the world when he settled on the moniker. Had that been the case, he might have gone with something else entirely, he comments while adjusting the collar of a black Blue Note Café T-shirt.
'What I do know for a fact is that we had our first lineup out the door a month or so after we started, and that it remained that way, pretty much, the rest of my time there.'
Riddell was 27 years old when his late mother Helen purchased the Main Spot, a homey, 64-seat diner that first opened at 220 Main St. in 1939. It was the fourth or fifth restaurant she ran, he recalls, and because she considered staff to be a needless expense, she was a one-person show, handling all the serving, cooking and cleaning herself, Monday to Friday.
Approximately four months into his mom's tenure at the Main Spot, Riddell approached her with a proposition. Since hers was a breakfast-and-lunch nook that closed for the day at 4 p.m., what if he assumed the reins four hours later under the Blue Note banner, and continued forth into the wee hours of the morning?
'At the time I wasn't doing anything of significance, mostly just gigging around in a series of bands,' says Riddell, a drummer who formed his first group, Riverside Oak, while attending Sturgeon Creek High School.
'I was also pretty naive, with no hospitality experience to speak of. Fairly early on a buddy of mine asked 'aren't you worried about this succeeding?' I was like, 'I'd never really considered that as a possibility.''
Riddell credits Frain Cory, a Free Press entertainment writer during the 1980s, for helping to put his fledgling venture on the map. On April 28, 1983, Cory wrote 'There's a village coffee house ambience to the Blue Note,' in his weekly After Dark column.
'Twelve dimly-lit, highback booths have visual access to a tiny seven-foot-square stage. Performers take the stage whenever and for however long the spirit moves them,' Cory continued, praising the five-week-old premises' 'unruffled atmosphere' and 'superior sounding stereo system,' the latter a gift to her son from Helen.
By that summer, things were going so swimmingly there that Riddell's mom ceased with the Main Spot altogether, and it became simply the Blue Note. That made things much easier, Riddell says, especially on those occasions when guests chose to hang out well past closing time (Burton Cummings once performed Guess Who classics non-stop from 3 a.m. until 6:30 a.m.), which meant they would still be there, albeit bleary-eyed, when his mom showed up to start her day.
As much as he enjoyed the 14 years he spent at the helm, Riddell admits to being ready for a change when he walked away from the Blue Note in 1997. (The café continued for a number of years under new ownership before shuttering altogether in the early 2000s.)
He threw himself into a new career, working in the local film industry for almost 20 years, before his move to Altona.
In August 2023, he attended a wake for George West that was held at Blue Note Park. (He was touched when Times Change(d) High and Lonesome Club owner John Scoles reached out to him in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, to seek his permission to name an empty outdoor site two doors down from his business after the café.)
In addition to being a longtime server at the Blue Note Café, West had also been a member of the Crash Test Dummies, back when they were the Blue Note's de facto house band, before the group became internationally known.
It was during what was billed as George West Fest that he began to consider compartmentalizing his personal experiences at the Note, having concluded 'I wasn't getting any younger, so if not now, when?' He reached out to Ken Datzkiw, a buddy of his with a writing background who'd also worked and performed at the Blue Note. Following some back-and-forth, the pair devised a plan to share Riddell's yarns with the rest of the world.
'Initially he talked about a book, but I wasn't sure how long that might take, or if Curtis would pay attention long enough to see it through,' says Datzkiw with a chuckle, seated in the lobby of the Winnipeg hotel he's staying at, during a quick trip to the city from his home in Fort Frances, Ont.
'Finally I said, why don't we start it as a public Facebook page, and see where that takes us. So that's the route we chose when we created Vague Recollections… in the fall of 2024.'
Datzkiw refers to the beginning entries as 'low-hanging fruit' — ones Riddell came up without much prodding.
Those include the time when Riddell and his brother Mark, founder of the Spectrum Cabaret (now the Pyramid), shared a few drinks with Robert Plant, ex- of Led Zeppelin. Or the two consecutive evenings in August 1987 when David Bowie's backing musicians commandeered the stage for hours on end, while the English rocker was in town for the Glass Spider Tour. Or the night Edmonton Oilers star Mark Messier jokingly (?) arm-wrestled Riddell for a date with his then-wife.
'The first few (posts) came pretty easily and since then, it's been a matter of jogging our memory banks, trying to pin down when this or that happened, and who all was involved,' says Datzkiw, explaining he's responsible for editing Riddell's lengthy text messages.
'He gets me to clean things up, only he doesn't want it to be too clean. At the end of the day, these are his stories, right?'
Back in Altona, Riddell says he tries to come up with a fresh yarn every week or so. To date, he's heard from people living across the country and points beyond, some of whom have suggested chestnuts of their own.
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'That's been one of the best parts. They'll read something of mine, which reminds them of a night they were there, and they'll comment, wondering if I remember it that way, too,' Riddell says, adding the reason so many people — A-listers and Winnipeggers alike — regularly darkened the Blue Note's doors was rather straightforward: there was scarcely anywhere else to go after last call at the local watering holes.
Riddell says a book still isn't out of the question. And as for future endeavours, he'd love to throw together a podcast of some sort, hopefully augmented with audio somebody may have recorded, all those years ago.
'That's a tough one because it's not like anybody had a smartphone back in the day. I guess it's like they say: what happened at the Blue Note, stayed at the Blue Note,' he says, running a hand through his grey coif.
'In the meantime, I'll keep trying to come up with new stories. Like when Axl Rose (of Guns N' Roses) showed up unannounced. Or when Rod Stewart sat in the back for three hours, listening to members of his band on stage. Or when (blues guitarist) Johnny Winter walked in, and everybody got out of their chairs to give him a standing ovation…'
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David Sanderson
Dave Sanderson was born in Regina but please, don't hold that against him.
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